There's a text-based adventure in the movie that the characters play briefly, so this riffs on that. Happy to answer any questions.
It's a neat idea with beautiful execution and I hope it gets more attention in other places than it got here. I'm not even sure what genre it is. It's not a game in the sense of requiring the player to solve anything, more of a novel in which the reader chooses a perspective and shapes the narrative but (AFAICT) cannot really direct the plot. Was the author of the game's text the same writer as the movie's plot and dialogue?
edit to add, also, was this built with an existing interactive fiction engine or was the site custom coded?
The idea was to make something that stood alongside the movie as a companion piece, an alternative way of experiencing it, rather than just a promotional thing. It's been fun seeing players playing for 4+ hours and barely getting through the first half, when the movie itself is 90 minutes and change.
I may try to post a Show HN later this week with more details, since the technical details are kind of fun. It's fully custom-coded and uses some LLMs under the hood (more as a 'game master' than in a creative capacity). I worked with the writer/director of the film to translate the script to a more interactive-friendly format, but he basically did the interactive adaptation himself.
I worked on the movie as a technical consultant and they credited me as 'unix wrangler' (I can check having an imdb page off my bucket list I guess)...
Easter eggs if anyone finds this and reads this far: try typing 'chloe' or 'camus' in the character selection screen.
I also really enjoyed the Popov "biography", I'm a sucker for that kind of is-it-true-or-is-it-performance-art stuff online. Reminds me of the Velocity Gnome saga[0].
I'm not sure why your comments were being flagged but hopefully the HN algorithm knows you're not spam at this point.
0: Very sad to see this site is dead - https://web.archive.org/web/20250317181550/https://thefuture...
There's also some caching involved which resets every 24 hours, so you will have a slightly different experience each time you play through (even if you choose the same character).
I also love the whole early 2000s ARG stuff I think it was a big part of the inspiration for the movie.
_wire_•6mo ago